20 March 2015

Eclipse

A
solar eclipse. The first one approaching a total eclipse of the Sun in the UK for
more than fifteen years. Although here at HaggardHawks HQ, while the Moon was
spectacularly blocking out the Sun, the rainclouds were spectacularly blocking
out the Moon. This is the UK, after all.

But
anyway. What can we tell you about eclipses?

Well,
the word eclipse first appeared in
English in the fourteenth century. Like pretty much every English word dating
from the fourteenth century, its earliest record comes from Geoffrey Chaucer, who used it in 1374 in a translation of a work by the Roman scholar Boethius. Before
then, the word was borrowed into English from French, but its earliest origins lie in its
Latin and Greek equivalents, eclipsis
and ekleipsis.

The
initial ec– of eclipse is the Greek word ek,
meaning “out” or “outside of”. It’s the same ec–
as in words like eccentric (literally
“outside of the centre”), ecstasy
(literally “out of place”), and anecdote
(literally “not given out”—or, to put it another way, “unpublished”). But it can also
be found in words like appendectomy
and tonsillectomy, in both of which it appears alongside the Greek word for “cut”, temnein; the surgical suffix –ectomy literally means “cut out”.

The
–lipse of eclipse is leipsis, a
Greek word essentially meaning “a failing”, “a leaving”, or “a shortfall”. Put
these two roots together, and you’ll get the Greek verb ekleipein, which was once variously used to mean “to fail to appear”, or “to not
be in your usual place”. And from there, it’s easy to see how the word came to be
attached to lunar and solar eclipses.